Don’t Differentiate, Create More Brand Desire!

In today’s cluttered and over-assorted market, the conversation in organizations often focuses on the importance of brand differentiation. The need to create or identify a position or particular area of emphasis that is different than what competitors currently offer customers. At face value, the idea of differentiation appears healthy and serves to foster crucial internal dialogue that can help shape and improve a company’s product or service.

But if you look deeper, the focus on differentiation as a driving discussion for a company or brand is flawed. The primary reason is that differentiation starts with a focus on what competitors are doing and not necessarily on what the customer wants, needs, or will value in your brand. The goal is not to be different from a competitor to compete but to be more valuable to a customer than your competitor. But “differentiation analysis” often doesn’t lead you in that direction, it tends to focus around what you shouldn’t do because someone else is already doing it, versus helping you identify what you should do to win more customers.

I encourage you to stop overemphasizing what your competitors are doing and to start focusing on what you can do to make your brand more desirable than your competitors in the eyes of your target consumers. And sometimes that means doing exactly what they are doing, only better.

As a guide, here are three core areas that you can explore to drive brand desire with today’s consumers.

Self Esteem

At the top of Maslow’s famous hierarchy sit Esteem and Self-Actualization. And never has the need for being “actualized” (even if in a superficial way) been more transparent. Thank you, Selfie-Nation. Consumers make hundreds of purchase decisions a year based on whether or not a product helps them “feel” more personally confident and/or more “esteemed” within their social circles. There are dozens of other dimensions that play into self-esteem that we don’t have time to go through here, but a simple google search will help you find them.

Brands can increase value and win amongst their competitive set by creating products/services that enhance the self-esteem of their customers better than their competitors. Of course, the key is doing the customer field work necessary to identify which dimension(s) you need to enhance to elevate your impact.

Brands like Nike focus on making you believe you are your best athlete through brand positioning/advertising, businesses like LVMH focus on creating a sense of prestige through exclusivity/quality/pricing with their brands, Apple focuses on making you feel relevant/on-trend through design aesthetics/frequent product enhancements, and Starbucks elevates your feelings of sophistication through the product experience.

Do you think any of the above brands are worried about being “different” from their competitors or do you think they are focused on building, strengthening, and maintaining their positions in the eyes of their customers?

Utility

Being useful is still one of the most straightforward and most direct ways for a brand or business to succeed. To understand the potential of this dimension you have to define “utility” in its correct terms and understand the dimensions of “utility” as they affect the consumers in your particular industry.

In retail, utility comes in the form of low prices, broad assortments, convenience, ease of shopping, friendly staff, and the list goes on. In the automobile industry (excluding the luxury segment which operates first on self-esteem, and secondarily on utility), it can be horsepower, towing capacity, safety, technology integration, and other options.

One of my favorite recent examples of winning on utility is Uber. Uber revolutionized the taxi and car service industry by creating an incredibly useful new product. Now some have argued that Uber won on the cool factor, which would be connected to Self Esteem. And don’t get me wrong, it’s cool, and it helped you look even cooler among your social circle if you were an early adopter, but that is not why it grew so fast. It exploded because scheduling a car service for about the same price you could pay while standing on the corner waving your hand like a maniac was better in every way. You were not cold in the winter, hot in the summer, wet in the rain, the cars were cleaner, the drivers were more helpful, and they showed up when you wanted them too. Now that is useful.

My point here is that if the Uber leadership team had started by saying, how can we be different than the competition. I don’t think they would have landed on the current product. Their solution was a customer first approach (i.e., they were starting with how do you make the customers experience better in every way, not different). Disruption almost always rises from being customer centric.

Connectedness/Community

This last dimension of desire has evolved rapidly over the last decade or so. I believe, in part, due to social media and the shared experience, it creates for all of us. As well as because some visionary leaders felt that doing good could be an essential part of good business.

In this space, brands are focused on finding ideas and belief systems that a group of consumers rallies around. It could be social consciousness, environmental consciousness, or even an activity like running or yoga. Several brands have capitalized successfully on this dimension over the last decade. Think Toms shoes for social well-being, or Lululemon and their fanatically Yogi base that establish a brand that has become so much more, or Method cleaning products and the environmentally minded with whom they connected. Although this area is arguably related to self-esteem at some level, it is a significant enough sub-area that I feel it should be broken out. Also, I view the focus here as being less self-centered than brands built around self-esteem.

Importantly, we are seeing significant brands use this area very differently than their traditional self-esteem models to build strong brand connections. Think the Superbowl ad by Budweiser where they show their factories being converted to “canned water” plants. Or, Aerie’s stand on no-retouching as a way to connect with the Body Positivity minded young women or P&G’s support of the mothers of Olympic athletes.

I share these frameworks because they are the ones I have used as a guide over the last 20 years and across six leading brands to help build “desired” and not necessarily “differentiated” brands.

Always start with your customer and not your competitors. I know this is easier said than done. We love to talk about our competitors because they are so knowable. Everything they do is documented so clearly in the products they make, the marketing they produce, and often the financial statements they publish.

Customers, on the other hand, are often difficult to know, their lives are less public, and even when they are (thanks again social media), it requires significant effort to aggregate it into digestible information. And even when you can see how they have behaved at large, it is still hard to understand their internal motivations and drivers. But that is where the ideas are that will help you build something truly “desirable.”

Fight the hard fight; it will be worth it in the end.

Brian Beitler has led the marketing teams for several leading brands including Kohl’s, Bath & Body Works, Hot Wheels, David’s Bridal, and Lane Bryant, among others. He believes in pushing brands to think differently about how they engage and earn loyalty from their customers, and is driven by the belief that the key to success is listening to your customers personally and first hand, and then combining those personal insights with big data to innovate your brand strategy, products, experience, and marketing. He is currently Chairman of the Board for the Global Retail Marketing Association.

April 20, 2018 by

Live the Questions

Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

Too often people jump to the answer before fully understanding the question.

I see this happen with companies often, especially in “brainstorming” meetings and customer interviews.

Most “brainstorming” meetings I attend look something like this: somebody presents a loosely defined goal, a few solutions are presented, the majority of the group jumps at one of the solutions early on, and then explores that solution. Not only isn’t this true brainstorming—brainstorming involves clearly defined problems and getting as many ideas out as possible without evaluation—it can never hope to produce a great solution: ill-defined problems lead to weak solutions.
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April 13, 2018 by

Are You Listening?

I remind myself every morning: Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So if I’m going to learn, I must do it by listening.
Larry King

Do you listen or do you just wait for your turn to talk?

When you listen, you have to be genuinely interested in what the other person is saying and be willing to let them change your mind. For most people, that’s not an easy state of mind nor is it something that naturally comes to them. It’s why it’s often referred to as active listening: it’s not a passive activity; it takes conscious effort to truly listen.

Listening is a valuable activity for both yourself and the person you’re listening to: it can help build your knowledge or let you see something from a different viewpoint; and, it lets the person you’re listening to know you care, listen to themselves, get something off their chest, and let them make way for new thoughts.

Listening is powerful.

Listening isn’t about outward behavior; it’s not about nodding or eye contact—although they will happen naturally—instead, it’s about being genuinely curious. It’s attitudinal, not behavioral.

I’ve sat in on many focus groups and customer interviews that were nowhere near as effective as they could have been because the interviewer was more focused on their questions than listening to the interviewees. As storytelling expert Annette Simmons comments, many people think asking questions equates to listening: “Some people are lousy listeners because they think that asking lots of questions is good listening. Asking lots of questions is a good way to destroy someone’s story-not to mention break the flow of introspection the storytelling might have begun.”1

And, you’ve all heard the stories about bosses that don’t listen; at some point, you’ve probably told them yourself.

Put simply, listening is about shutting up and paying attention.

One of the most effective ways I’ve found of training yourself to listen comes from when I studied Linklater Method—a voice-based acting training—in college: Once in a while when you’re talking with people, briefly pay attention to your breath; if you’re holding it, you’re focused on something else, likely what you’re about to say in response; you’re not in the moment, listening. As Kristen Linklater, the founder of the technique, says, “If you’re holding your breath in any way, you’re absent.”
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Learn to listen. Few other activities will reward you as much as listening can.

_______________________

April 6, 2018 by

How To Achieve Maximum Influence

“Every generation seeks the Holy Grail of instantaneous influence—in the information age we seek the sound bite that moves the masses—but it doesn’t exist. Human behavior is influenced over time, within a context, and by focusing primarily on how people feel.”
Anette Simmons, The Story Factor

Good companies place a strong focus on how customers perceive them. Great companies know they also have to understand how customers perceive themselves.

Look at any survey or attend any customer interview and you see a slew of questions that make the customer evaluate the company: How satisfied are you? When was the last time you made a purchase? How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or family member?

Sure, many of these surveys use some of the questions to create demographic and “psychographic” categories, But, these categories rarely reflect the way people view themselves and feel in the context of buying from the company. They’re abstract generalizations that can help figure out where to place advertising, but they ignore the emotional context of the real individuals actually buying from you.

If you don’t understand their hearts, you can’t win their hearts. And, if you can’t win their hearts, you can’t influence their buying decisions.

Next time you engage in collecting customer data rather than make the survey or interview all about you, also make it about them. You’ll learn valuable strategic information, and you’re likely to see your customers in a new light: as people rather than numbers. And, people are much easier to sell to than numbers.

March 30, 2018 by

How to Get the Conversation Started

Recently, I was consulting a CEO on strategic presentation skills, they tended to keep talking without stopping and needed some work to better connect with the people in the room. We talked about the importance of pausing during the presentation and asking a question to engage the audience. With this small adjustment, speaking became more impactful, and the message connected.

One of the best ways to achieve engagement is by using open-ended questions, questions that encourage your colleagues to share ideas and opinions, and by carefully listening to what they say you will kindle mutual respect.

Here are some of my favorite opened-ended questions:

What inspires you?

What is the most meaningful part of your job?

What do you value most in life?

Would you tell me more about ___?

What’s the most important priority for you with this?

Who benefits from your vision?

Try finding opportunities to ask questions and see how quickly you engage people when you listen to what they have to say.

March 23, 2018 by

Brand Conversations

Too many Chief Marketing Officers are trapped in “brand conversations” behind their desks, in conference rooms, or around the boardroom table, and it’s hurting their organization’s connection to the customer, the understanding of what’s happening with their brands, and the ideas necessary to drive growth.

I’ve spent nearly two decades as a Chief Marketer and found myself in similar situations time and again. There is an incredible amount of internal work that is required for any senior role.  All of it necessary to keep the machine humming; there are strategy documents to review, creative concepts to approve, P&L’s to manage, new technology to explore, organizational structure and teams to develop, and, of course, internal & external relationships to nurture, among a thousand other things.

I do not dismiss or downplay the importance of the above. But I do worry that too often that work for crowds out what I think is one of the Chief Marketer’s most important roles—Having personal brand conversations with the customer. I mean personal, you and the customer face to face. I cannot underscore enough the importance of this because these conversations allow you to understand the customer in a way that cannot be attained through traditional research and analytic methods.

A Chief Marketer must be able to do more than articulate the demographics of a customer, the purchase life-cycle, media habits, or even cultural touchstones. While these are important, they will do little to help you truly understand why people love, hate or are indifferent to your brand, product, or service. And understanding “The Why” behind the connection is the critical factor to creating differentiation, brand affinity, and growth.

Barriers to entry have dropped in almost every industry, and the range of choice has grown exponentially over the last two decades.  There are now over 49 brands of peanut butter, and that is before you include all the “private label” brands available at every grocery store. And the complexity only multiplies if you include all the variation of peanut butter within those brands.

So which brand or product should a customer choose and why, and why should they stay loyal when there is so much choice in every category. How do you create a brand connection and a point of difference in all of this clutter?

Simple…Understand “Why.” Why is the customer buying your brand of peanut butter and what are their deep underlying motivations? Are they complex or simple? Based on utility, image, nostalgia or something else? Are they practical or irrational? If you want to be able to move the dial and attract new customers, you have to get this right.

Look at a brand like Nike…why do they continue to win? I strongly believe it is because they have a strong brand position & purpose that connects directly with the most broadly shared “why” in their category. That shared “why” for their customers is the desire to perform at your best in whatever sport or athletic activity you are participating in. These are people who strive (or at least believe they strive) to be the best.

And boy do they understand that collective “why” and how to position against it. Projecting the image of being at the top of your game is in everything they do, from their product innovation to their advertising to their athletic sponsorships. Take soccer for instance, while Adidas may have won sponsorship of FIFA and the World Cup, the #1 soccer player in the world, Cristiano Ronaldo of Real Madrid, is sponsored by Nike. And this is true in nearly every sport. Nike has a way of finding the very best athlete and using them to remind us that the best athletes choose Nike.

So, the real question is how do you find the most powerful and collective “why” for your industry and brand. Well, you certainly don’t do it by reading sales or media reports from behind your desk or discussing it with your C-suite peers at the water cooler, or even waiting for it to show up in a customer insights report.

The work of finding the “why” is real anthropological work and it should be done up close and in person by the CMO, other members of the leadership team, and candidly by anyone who has an impact on what the customer experiences within your business. The great anthropologists of our time don’t delegate the work of studying their subjects to someone else; they are actively involved in the field work.

I’m not saying that you can’t or shouldn’t hire someone to do deep ethnographies on your customers, but I am saying you should not rely solely on the work of someone else to help inform a decision about your brand position, product, or marketing.

You must get into the field and do some field work. And the truth, having authentic “brand conversations” with your customers is much easier than you might think. I have found that customer love to talk to executives about their products and services and they will open up more to you than to your focus group moderator. In fact, for 20 years I have come out from “behind the glass” at almost every single focus group, and often our most powerful insights have come from that last 10-15 minutes of conversations directly with the customer.

I and my teams have also spent hours in the store each month talking to and shopping with our customers, taking note of their behaviors, discussing their family and work, talking about the reasons they chose to walk in our store or why they decided to pick up that toaster or pair of jeans. The things we would hear at times would amaze us and prompt entirely new pieces of customer insight work and purchase analysis.

That work would help us compose a richer understanding of what was going on in our customer’s mind when she made a purchase or even a return. When she responded to or ignored a marketing communication, or when she passed a merchandising table on the sales floor. Or, when she skipped past pages on our mobile app.

To help you understand how real and powerful this has been over my career let me share a recent experience while I was serving as Chief Marketing Officer at Lane Bryant.

At Lane Bryant, we had a common challenge that many legacy brands face—Lane Bryant had been around since 1904 after all. Our customer base had aged, many younger potential customers didn’t perceive us as relevant, price promotion had become our primary marketing lever, our social connection with customers was soft, and the competition was rampant and growing in our Plus-size apparel category.

We needed to figure out how to reconnect with women and change the conversation about our brand. But how and where should we start?

Well, that is where “brand conversations” come into play. I had all the research a new CMO could want, years of tracking studies, historical purchases analyses, customer segmentation models, and more. The conclusions in all of these reports were solid and well supported. Some pointed to price—we were too expensive for a younger demographic. Some pointed to style—not enough women seemed to like our assortment. Others pointed to relevance—they felt the brand was fine, it was just for “their mom.”

But in all of this work, something was missing. Almost all of the reasons for love or indifference outlined in the research were rational: price, style, convenience, perceived age appropriateness of the brand. But love or hate of a brand isn’t purely rationale; it’s emotional. Sure, love is supported by tangible, rational qualities, but there is always something deeper more poignant below the surface. We wanted to know what that was. And we needed to know it “first hand.”

So we traveled our stores, lots of our stores, talking to women about the love of the brand. And the more women we met and the more conversations we had, the more these clear themes of “why” began to emerge. And a conversation that I had with Yonea in Dallas summed it all up.

Yonea was 35 and a ski shop manager. Yes, I know a ski shop in Dallas, but I guess even Texans need a place to buy skis for their winter adventures. Anyway, she made this statement when I asked her “why” she loved Lane Bryant. She simply said:

“Because when I cross the threshold of Lane Bryant, the “plus-size” drops and I’m just a woman.”  She continued, “In this store, I am seen for whom I am and the fashion I love and not the size of my body.”

Yonea’s statement beautifully captured the sentiment of so many of the personal conversations we were having with women all over the country. Her “why,” their “why” was crystal clear: In our store, they were being seen and celebrated just like any other women in the world. And this feeling endeared them to us. So we started asking other prospective customers if they felt this way in the brand or store of their choice…some said yes, most said no. You see most department stores and even other “plus-size” specialty stores treated plus-size women as second-class citizens. In department stores, plus-size is often not even located near the other women’s apparel.

What was interesting though, is that when asked what they wanted to feel, these prospective customers all had the same answer. They wanted, as Shania Twain put it, to “Feel like a woman.” Not a plus-size woman.

Now I know this sounds so simple in retrospect, especially with all the progress we have made with body diversity in the last three years. But in 2014, this idea of seeing and celebrating “plus-size” women didn’t exist anywhere in culture. The world was still telling them to lose weight, not to love themselves. There wasn’t a single fashion magazine covering plus-size women with any real intent, and there certainly wasn’t a single fashion retailer or fashion brand featuring diverse bodies in advertising.

This powerful insight, found through up close and personal anthropological work, is what set us on a path to develop campaigns and partnerships that would change the national dialogue on body image and rejuvenate our century-old brand.

It gave way to the #ImNoAngel campaign with 15B+ earned social & media impressions; the #PlusIsCampaign with 6B+ earned social & media impressions, and #ThisBody campaign in partnership with the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition and Ashley Graham which would generate over 9B social & media impressions. There is so much more to the story, but for the sake of space. We will end with this.

Get out of the office and have some Brand Conversations with your customers and potential customers face to face, and you might just find the unlock that you’ve been searching for.

Brian Beitler has led the marketing teams for several leading brands including Kohl’s, Bath & Body Works, Hot Wheels, David’s Bridal, and Lane Bryant, among others.  His success has been built on helping these brands build purposeful connections with their customers, capitalize on the digital and social revolution, and improve the effectiveness of their marketing investments.  He believes in pushing brands to think differently about how they engage and earn loyalty from their customers, and is driven by the belief that the key to success is listening to your customers personally and first hand, and then combining those personal insights with big data to innovate your brand strategy, products, experience, and marketing.

He is currently Chairman of the Board for the Global Retail Marketing Association and served as Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Lane Bryant & Catherines, the nation’s leading plus-size apparel retailers, until late 2017.  He is a widely regarded industry speaker and has keynoted at some of the industry’s most noted events including the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, NRF’s Symposium, and the 4A’s Transformation event.

March 16, 2018 by

Discovering Your Big Idea

Big ideas, when they stick, can guide an organization to an extraordinary future. It helps you determine when to move and where. It provides a shared vision that creates cohesion within your organization, which can lead to superior execution over time.

To discover or refine your big idea, consider the following questions:

End Picture: What will your business look like when it’s done?

Passion: What does your organization love doing? What are your collective strengths (based on employee passion, past performance, and available resources)?

Leadership: What will your organization be a leader in? What are you committed to being the best in the world at?

Impact: Where can your enterprise have the most significant impact? Who are you committed to best serving?

As with any discovery process, be sure to start with a Beginner’s Mind. Pretend that you don’t know the answers.

Be open-minded.

Be receptive to any idea, even the most outrageous ones.

Stay curious my friends.

March 9, 2018 by

Know Thy Customer

This could be called the first law of Cult Branding.

Know thy Customer better than they know themselves.

This could be called the Secret Law of Cult Branding.

Customers Don’t Know Why They Buy.

This might be deemed the problem with the conventional market analysis.

Don’t Ask Why, Observe!

If customers don’t know why they buy then how do we discover why? Jane Goodall became a primate expert. She permanently moved in proximity with a troupe of chimpanzees and lived with them for years. She watched chimps grow up, grow old and die. She unraveled the vibrant social life of chimpanzees and how it affected their behavior. Humans are vastly more complicated than chimpanzees. It takes more than an anthropology study to grasp the mechanisms at play when it comes to human behavior.

Most of the Human Experience is Below Conscious Radar.

The Landscape of the Subconscious is much, much bigger than the Conscious realm. Human behavior is a dynamic interplay of the conscious/subconscious. This is one critical reason that Cult Branding has become well versed in the science of the subconscious.

Human Behavior is Primarily Social.

The evolution of human beings is fundamentally the story of social systems.   Virtually all human behavior is socially driven or has social implications.

Where We Live Matters, and it is Changing!

Cult Branding understands that human behavior is complex and highly reactive. They also know that the world is in a state of flux and the old rules don’t apply. To understand the customer, you have to look at the environment they operate in.

Why is Cult Branding Different?

To know thy customer requires a profound grasp of human behavior, the subconscious mind as well as the marketplace. Taking this information and extrapolating the more profound memes and themes of the mind of your customer and using it to create a more compelling customer experience is what Cult Branding is all about.

Do you Know Thy Customer?

February 23, 2018 by

How Mindfulness Improves the Workplace

“The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.”
Jon Kabat-Zinn

The truth is that many of us spend most of our time in the office. Think about how you can transform the lives of those around you by becoming more aware.

This shift toward more humanistic management practices doesn’t merely improve productivity, creativity, collaboration, loyalty, and profitability; it can also help the people around you become better spouses, better parents, and better citizens.

You can invite your employees to grow by finding ways to make the workplace more engaging (less static), more inspiring (less mundane), and more open (less fixed). As Abraham Maslow put it, “We must try to make a particular kind of people, of personality, of character, of soul one might say, rather than try to create directly particular kinds of behavior.”

When we practice mindfulness, we are training our brains to examine internal and external cues rather than react to them, so we can better manage emotions and develop into our full humanity.

February 16, 2018 by

It May Be Time To Do Less

Are you busy? Isn’t that a stupid question to ask? Of course you are. You have a lot to do and it all NEEDS to get done.

That’s the way it seems.

But, truthfully, a lot of what you’re doing is probably getting in the way of what really NEEDS to get done. And, you may be so busy that you haven’t stepped back to distinguish between what truly NEEDS to get done what you believe needs to get done.

We constantly get projects—large and small—and rarely give them the evaluation that our sanity and our business’s future deserve.

Look at everything you’re doing and ask: does it push you closer to your ultimate vision? Also ask: if you didn’t do it could you still get to your ultimate vision. If it fails one of these tests, why are are you doing it? The reason should be better than because you “have to”—although that’s often the reason most of us do the things we do at work.

Eliminating everything that isn’t essential to achieving your ultimate vision gives you the time to focus on everything that is essential to taking a step toward that goal.

And, it’s likely to cut down on the uber-bane of every business person: meetings. Instead of having meetings for updates or just because that’s the “culture” of the business—I’m sure you know that’s a bad culture to have—only schedule meetings that are required to make a step toward the ultimate vision. If a meeting doesn’t have an essential goal that’s clear and achievable at the meeting, then that meeting only hurts the company by taking people’s attention away from what really matters.

If it’s not essential, it’s not moving you forward. And, it’s probably driving you crazy.

February 9, 2018 by